1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to guidance methods for the production of art works, and more particularly, to a guidance method for the production of a relief sculpture.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In order to make the pleasure and relaxation of working with art media available to persons lacking skill or experience in artistic techniques, certain guidance methods have been developed which enable persons using them to produce a pre-designed work of professional appearance with relative ease. In the well-known "paint by numbers" system, for example, a canvas is provided with a pre-drawn outline, in which areas to be painted a certain color are designated by a certain number corresponding to that color. By painting designated areas of the outline with specified colors, a complete, multi-colored painting is produced. These guidance techniques offer particular value in the area of art education, since they permit a beginning artist to gain experience working with art media without exposure to the sense of failure which an inexperienced or unskilled artist may feel upon producing an unattractive or abortive work. Additionally, such guides permit persons of higher artistic skill, who are primarily seeking the relaxation of working with art media, the opportunity to produce attractive works without the creative strain which may be associated with producing an original work.
Guidance techniques permitting a novice artist to produce a pre-designed work of sculpture are known in the prior art. Generally, such prior art techniques have involved the use of a pre-designed stencil or template on a wedge of sculpture material pursuant to a design plan. The stencil is used to guide the carving of a section of sculpture of predetermined thickness from the wedge, with different templates being thereafter used to produce sections of the same thickness with different shapes. The sections thus formed are stacked adjacent to or atop one another in accordance with the design plan to form a complete three-dimensional sculpture.
The type of sculpture guidance technique described above has generally proved successful for sculpture media such as wood, from which sections may be accurately cut and stacked without substantial risk of deviation from the design plan. In more pliable sculpture media such as clay, on the other hand, prior art guidance techniques have not proven very satisfactory. With pliable media, the sculptured setions which are shaped individually by using the supplied templates are likely to be deformed or altered during the handling involved in assembling the sculpture. For example, with regard to sculpture elements built from two or more stacked sections, it will ordinarily be required that adhesive contact be formed between the sections, in order to prevent the sculpture from falling apart. Thereafter, it may be required, for aesthetic reasons, that the junction or junctions between the stacked sections be concealed, and that square corners at the boundaries of the sections be rounded out. The processes involved in accomplishing these steps, when executed by an inexperienced sculptor, necessarily entail risks that the sculpture, as finally formed, may feature undesirable departures from the design plan.
A more fundamental difficulty with the prior art guidance techniques described above rests in their procedural difference from the sculpture techniques used by the experienced, professional sculptor. While a person using a prior art guidance technique generally forms a sculpture by assembly of a number of sub-element wedges formed from sculpture medium, the professional sculptor generally produces a work by the entirely different process of removing sculpture material from a single block of sculpture medium. Consequently, persons following prior art guidance techniques are unable to fully experience and utilize classical sculpture methods. This may not only diminish the quality of their aesthetic experience, but may also reduce the art educational value of the guidance technique as well.